Not sure where best to put this (historic preservation? The Willard Pl 40-story rezoning request? Oakwood?) but an interesting conundrum here: the Society for the Preservation of Historic Oakwood wants to buy a city-owned parking lot within Oakwood (for $100,000 under the minimum bid requirement, which is already $100,000+ below the tax value of the lot) to move two historic homes currently under threat: The big yellow house near the corner of the Bloomsbury lot (Boylan x Hargett) and the 615 Willard Pl house that’s behind the new Willard Hotel.
While I’m all for the moving and preservation of historic homes, the purpose of the city selling that lot in Oakwood was to raise funds for their affordable housing program (this is one of many city-owned lots they have put on the market for this purpose) - which the Oak Preservation society acknowledges, but also stated:
“It’s all well and good for the City Council to say that money raised from the sale of this lot is going to go toward affordable housing,” Penven-Crew said. “But even if they got the appraised value, that is a drop in the bucket toward affordable housing. It’s not going to make or break their affordable housing program.” …well, ok, but if every lot was considered in that way, then there wouldn’t even be a “drop in the bucket” towards affordable housing program(s)… so that’s not really a great argument lmao.
I also find this statement laughable:
And there is hope, she said, that the homes could serve as affordable housing but that’s a future consideration and would require another partner. Right now, the goal is to save the homes. “The only criteria that he Society for the Preservation of Historic Oakwood has, at this point, is to try to rescue a property that is going to be torn down,” she said. “And so we need to make sure that we get that done. And then we need to explore whether we can make it into some kind of affordable housing space.”
Oh yeah, I’m sure they’ll spend the (lowball) $300,000 to buy the lot, then who knows how many hundreds of thousands it’ll cost to safely move the houses and then secure them onto their new lots, probably needing some hefty renovation to get them up to Oakwood standards… then turn around and rent them out for under market-rates out of the kindness of their hearts 
I’m all for moving these houses, and the surface lot they intend to move them to is certainly appropriate, but I’d need to see a lot more offered from them in writing before I’d support this in full.
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-county/article269727526.html